Last week's Friday seminar featured Georgia Tech professor (and ITS Berkeley alum) Alan L. Erera presenting his work in the area of dynamic dispatching for same-day deliveries, focusing on the last mile problem. He briefly mentioned that he would not be discussing drones because they are not as efficient as trucks due to batching (and the new FAA regulations make them even more unfeasible). Erera focused on optimizing delivery dispatch multiple times throughout the day with prediction of when new orders may arrive and how to route the deliveries. Here are his slides so you can experience the talk all over again (without cookies).

The key to Veniam's success on Porto has been the city's fibre-optic backbone to create wifi hotspots around the city, like bus stops. A combination of wifi and the IEEE 802.11p standard for wireless vehicle communication, and deployment in fleets such as many of the city's taxis and Metro de Porto's fleet, made the city wide mesh network possible. It also made it very cheap to offer free wifi on the entire bus fleet, which has pleased passengers.

For the buses, the connectivity can be used for ticketing, navigation, infotainment, and vehicle diagnostics. This has also created a very rich, high definition data set of the fleet's operations which has informed service and route updates.

The mesh network has also been very effective in tracking operations at Porto de Leixões. Early attempts to track vehicles with cellular technology were hindered by the lack of cell towers in the industrial area and interference from shipping containers. The wifi mesh network has made it possible to track port traffic to improve efficiency and safety.

Barros hinted that the next wave of innovation could be in the field of wearables. His group had a project that tracked bus driver comfort and stress to better understand their behavior and how it depends on the built environment.

Campus parking at UC Berkeley, like many universities, is a hot comodity. The only people who get free and easy parking on campus are Nobel Laureates, though even they have to renew their permits. Recently a case study about parking on campus was published in Case Studies on Transport Policy. William Riggs from Cal Poly San Louis Obispo descibes how balancing transit incentives and parking pricing can shift travel behavior, and how social incentives can be as effective as fiscal incentives. Here is the article:

Last Friday transportation consultant Peter Jacobsen was the featured speaker of the ITS Berkeley Transportation Seminar. He discussed his reseasrch in bicycle and pedestrian safety captured in his seminal paper, "Safety in Numbers" (Injury Prevention, v.9 no. 3, 2013). One of the questions he raised was how to define safety. Is it reflected in the data (number of incidents) or behavior (which is difficult to tease from that data)? Jacobsen remarked that, "No one swims in shark infested waters." So when people think it is safer to ride their bicycle or walk, they will be more likely to do so - this is the crux of the safety in numbers thesis. Jacobsen's anaylsis showed that if cycling and walking increase by 300%, the individual's risk only increases 50%. This is also why Jacobsen's anlysis shows that cyclists in Upland, CA have 8-times greater risk than cyclists here in Berkeley. He then suggested there needs to be more research into whether or not more bicycles increase safety for pedestrians and vice versa.

Jacobsen also made an interesting observation that increased pedestrian safety is not tied to behvaior. He related an anecdote about pedestrians in Sacramento who are very alert because they don't expect cars to yield to them, while pedestrians in Berkeley are often more distracted (with their heads in their phones) because they know cars will yield. Their comfort with the situation is reflected in their behavior. Jacobsen also used the iconic crosswalk of Abbey Road as an example of the evolution of street markings for safety. Watch the live stream now to see it in action - flashing crossing lights, zig-zag lane markers, and more to make it safe for crossing.

Second, on Saturday 31 January, 2015 from 10:00am to noon the city of Berkeley hosts the Adeline Corridor Redesign Community Meetingat the South Berkeley Senior Center (2992 Ellis Street). Many of the proposed design ideas focus on improving access and safety for pedestrians and cyclists in the area. In 2010, a UC Berkeley Design Studio examined the area, and you can see their designs here. Are they going to be implemented? Time will tell.

Last week many of you attended the TRB 94th Annual Meeting in DC. All meeting registrants have complimentary access to all of the Annual Meeting Papers online. You can access the Compendium of papers online.

When logging in, use email address you registered for the meeting under. Your initial password will be your 6-digit registration confirmation code. Once you log in, you can then change your password. You will have access to the papers from 2015 and back to 2011. Presentations from this year will be available online after March.

If you did not attend the Annual Meeting and want to access the papers we have them available at the library. Just ask for them at the circulation desk, or email us directly.

Now that the Fall Semester is over, lots of students are packing up and flying home for the break. We here at the ITS Library will also be leaving town, and the library will be closed from December 22, 2014 through January 19, 2015. We will reopen on Tuesday, January 20, 2015 at 1:00PM. (Will we see you at TRB?)

Or more realistically, everybody loves to complain about bus bunching - when two or more buses (usually on the same line) should be evenly spaced out, but are right behind one another. Here around UC Berkeley AC Transit's 51b in the line most people complain about bunching (they're working on it!), but every transit systems has its own problem line(s).